cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423
This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.
I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)
I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.
Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:
Lol at the Commie Cluster
this is really, really interesting. thank you for this.
instance reach and relationships are pretty wild and I can see this helping people to mix up their communities between instances.
the tight groupings of some instance communities might be source of pride or distress, depending.
would be nice to select a community and query its n closest overlap neighbors or all neighbors within a certain distance.
very cool project.
If I can figure that out I would definitely do that.
as a followup to how useful your visualization is, I have started spreading comments across a wider selection of instance communities.
this is something I have considered before, but your visulazation made the possible utility and usefulness of doing so much more “real”.
I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024
So it’s a map of the top 35 instances for the last month instead of a map of Lemmy.
The 36th most active instance is Lemy.lol with 143 monthly active users. Out of 47k total, that seems reasonable
What do the axis mean?
The original data had 21,000+ features. I used an algorithm to reduce the dimensions to 2 but keep a similar structure (so similar communities are close dissimilar communities are far away).
So the axes don’t really mean anything in particular.
Page doesnt load
Probably a webgl problem. I had to use ungoogled chromium to open the page. I think it works on regular firefox too.
I use Tor Browser. OP should generate an image or have some sort if fallback for noscript users
I can see my basement from here! Thanks!
